Yes, the last six months have seen less effort going to Armadillo than before, but it has been due to external forces – a new baby at home, and a new project at Id. The drive to complete things is as strong as ever at Armadillo, and more of my time will shift back to rockets when all the technologies are mature for the new Id project. In the meantime, we still work and make progress every single week, even if I don’t get the updates out as often.

It was a hard decision to walk away from the mixed monoprop experience base, but a lot of the lessons learned and skills built in the last year will still transfer over to the new lox vehicle. We need to work out our cryogenic handling procedures, gimbal actuators, roll thrusters, and throttleable biprop engine, then we will be putting everything together into a test vehicle again.

We flew four different vehicles in the last twelve months (and crashed three of them), it won’t be all that long before we are back in the air, hopefully without the engine related problems that have plagued us.

I will be at Space Access ’05 at the end of the month, and I recommend it to anyone considering attending.

Compared to many other companies, even the less frequent updates, seemed still a lot to me and it's perfectly understandable that you're also thinking about your own family and your programming work.

I wish you a lot of succes the upcomming weeks and I'm definitely waiting to read your progress updates

I really wish I was able to go to all those events... but europ (belgium) is so far to travel, I'm going to try to visit the X PRIZE Cup & Expo this year.
I hope to see you as wel as many other people I learned to respect and know while developing and running this website.

>Has any thought been given to contacting the ARCA (Romainian) team about sharing
>information and technology regarding monoprop programs?

Based on their updates, theyare using 60-68% peroxide, which isn't readily available to us. The pure monoprop work is uninteresting at that concentration, but I would be interested in hearing more details about the peroxide / ethanol mixed monoprop they fired a couple years ago. That mixture was almost certainly in the detonable range, and it was a pure liquid (not very throttleable) injector, so it wouldn't be something we could use on our projects, but the development stories would be fun to hear.

We are going to make the LOX / alcohol motors work. We have been machining a chamber a week for a while now...